Face/Off at 20: revisiting the film

One of the great pleasures of following genre cinema is the long, enduring onscreen conversation that’s taken place between movie directors from the East and the West, a creative push and pull which has resulted in some of the most boundary-pushing, inventive and important films ever made. When Akira Kurosawa wrote The Hidden Fortress, an airy homage to the John Ford Westerns he loved so much, he can’t have predicted its rollicking adventuring would be re-interpreted and sent into space by George Lucas to form the basis of the most successful film franchise in history in Star Wars: A New Hope. Similarly, when Ringo Lam took the tropes of 70’s Eurocrime and American gangster movies of the 30s and 40s, and upped the machismo and